Distributed maintenance of mutable information for virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments are distributed systems that offer collaboration environments containing multiple types of media sources. Taking into account additional constraints such as bounded latency scalability becomes a challenging problem in such systems. This work explores the design space of developing scalable, heterogeneous and dynamic virtual environments based on distributed hash tables. Such structures have been exploited for large scale peer-to-peer systems to provide fast lookup operations in a well distributed way. In This work it is argued that large scale collaborative virtual environments can operate more effectively using peer-to-peer communication paradigms. Such approaches reduce the high communication cost and avoid potential performance bottlenecks of centralized approaches. The load-balancing issues are addressed by distributing the maintenance responsibility for storing and providing dynamic, persistent information that describes the state of the virtual environment. Heterogeneity in participants' capabilities is also being considered.